France

Fun fact, this is also the language spoken in the us

If the internationally recognised langauge is broken English then I'm the king of speaking broken barely understandable English with accents that make things unledigble winner winner oh god stargazy pie is for dinner

It's a pun, so more of a /j. I'm not sure how well it would work in French, since I'm very far from fluent.

It's just a statement of fact - English is the most common Lingua Franca. The fact that the original term referred to the Frankish region, the predecessor to modern day France, makes the sign kinda ironic.

English is such a shitty language the native speakers are bad at it 💀

Computers are programmed in programming languages. They do (most of the time) have English words as keywords, but changing them is trivially easy. You could have a "Esperanto C" working in a day. And changing a C program to Esperanto C would be trivially easy. The only problem would be the new keywords being used in the old program, but that's easy to find and replace with a new identifier.

I would really love an international language with consistent spelling and where the spelling matches the pronunciation. For me the chosen language doesn't have to be artificial, but the selection process should be: a scientific choice based on consistency, ease of learning, clarity in meaning, ... Everyone who knows a few languages, knows English is probably the worst choice when it comes to these objective criteria.

It's like the system of measurement: leave it to the people and we'd all still be using wacky thumbs, feet and elbows for measuring, but smart people came together in France (a few times) and now we have an easy to understand consistent system of measurement.

They're just playing the long con

Ich spreche doch Deutsch...

That's also part of the reason why I picked it, although I've had a hard time finding the right data to support that hypothesis. It's not as easy as asking what the most commonly-spoken languages are; instead, you've got to ask which language to learn next gets you the largest increment of being able to talk to more folks. That means you've got to subtract out the folks that speak language X but also language Y that you already accounted for, so to do it properly the data set you start with has to tell you which set of languages each individual person in the world speaks.

(Also, it's almost certainly true that French is beaten out by Mandarin Chinese in terms of being the second language with the largest increment, but I picked French instead of Chinese to learn first because French speakers are distributed throughout the world, whereas most Chinese speakers are in China. And as you already noted for Spanish, it and Hindi lost out because even though they have more total speakers than French, the increment might not be as large because so many of them also speak English.)

I speak English, French and Italian. English is still by far the language that helped me most in South America.

But but ouat of ze grammatical cultural exception?

A coworker of mine suggested that Dutch is the easiest language to learn for native English speakers, so I've been learning it on the side for the past few months.